In this second part of my essay I will argue that the Courtly Love tradition provides an opening for a more expansive reading of the unicorn. It allows for an interpretation which combines the mystical tradition of sacrificial love with the troubadour cult of romantic desire. Here the unicorn plays the role of a mysterious mediator between the poet lover and his beloved and at times even comes to symbolize the lover himself.

The troubadour movement of fine amour came to full fruition between the 13th and 15th centuries and offered a stark alternative to the allegorical readings of the unicorn as a carnal threat to Lady Reason. A typical account of the Courtly Love interpretation is to be found in Richard de Flourival’s Bestiaire d’amours (mid 13th century). This was a well known source of the time, so I quote at some length. The poet writes: “This is why I say that if I was captivated by Hearing and Sight it is no surprise if I lost my sense and memory. For hearing and seeing are the two windows to the memory…and they are the most noble senses of man. For man has five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell….and I was taken by Smell also, like the unicorn, who falls asleep in the sweet scent of the virginity of the demoiselle….Love, who is a cunning hunter, placed in my path a young girl whose sweetness sent me to sleep and made me die that death that belongs to Love.”⁷See Li bestiaires d'amours di Maistre Richard de Fourneval e li response du besstiaire, ed Cesare Segre, Documenti de Filogia, vol 11, Milan and Naples, 1957. See illuminating commentary by Carl Nordenfalk, "The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art" in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol 48, The Warburg Institute, 1985, pp 1-3. (7).

Another very influential verse from this period is to be found in the widely cited Song Book: the Capture of the Unicorn. Here the poet, Thibaut IV of Champagne, pens this portrait of the unicorn as symbol of the fatally love-bedazzled suitor.

Like the unicorn, I am lost in wonder
contemplating the young girl
He delights so in his torment
That he faints upon the virgin’s breast
And at that moment is treacherously killed.
I too have been killed in such a way,
For love and for my lady, in truth:
They hold my heart and I cannot recover it.⁸Song Book: the Capture of the Unicorn (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 846, fol.I. Circa 1280-1300). See Delahaye's commentary on this in the section, "The Lion and the Unicorn in the Middle Ages," Ibid.

This verse is a heady brew of mystical-Christian and secular-erotic themes. It represents the commingling of two views, one typical of the Middle Ages, the other of the early Renaissance. It is interesting to note, moreover, how the courtly love tradition often compares the lady/unicorn couple to legendary lovers from Classical and Celtic literature. We find typical allusions to Dido and Aeneas, Tristan and Isolde, and Lancelot and Guinevere. In these “mixed” scenes the unicorn seems to represent both the Incarnation of the senses and the chastity of the savior, who interestingly exerts a mystical power over lovers in the guise of a “captivator of poets.” The poet-lover thus likens himself, in Thibaut’s verse, to the unicorn whose sacrificial surrender in the “lap” of the virgin is comparable to the capture-rapture of his own heart in the bosom of his beloved. Indeed in several visual renderings of this chaine d’amour we find the unicorn acting as both “host” to the poet and “hostage” to the Lady, the two roles blending into each other. In short, the hunted Unicorn both captures the poet and is captured by the Lady. Or in another double gesture, the unicorn-lover is at once actively seducing the virgin and passively seduced by her. Moreover, this latter allusion to seduction is most graphically portrayed by frequent images of a young virgin tied naked to a tree, whose sweet scent entices the lover-unicorn who is then surrounded and killed by the “hunters” of love. Indeed in some etchings the unicorn is even depicted kissing the virgin’s perfumed breasts.⁹Kristina Gourlay, " la Dame à la Licorne: A Reinterpretation," in La Gazette des Beaux Arts, Sept 1997, pp 53 and 62.

5. The Captured Unicorn (ca. 1500)

But it is time to return to the Cluny tapestries. In light of the above interpretations we may now ask what is meant by the narrative sequence of the six tableaux. What, to cite our earlier mention, are we to make of the Lady stroking the horn of the Unicorn in the tableau, Touch? Or, in the tableau, Sight, inviting it to rest its hooves on her knees as it leans towards her breast to look in her hand-held mirror? How does the tableau “Scent” echo the scene of the captivatingly perfumed virgin? And how do the remaining scenes of Hearing (where the Lady plays music as the Unicorn swoons) and Taste (where her pet monkey consumes sweet fruit) fit with the reading of fine amour?

Finally, how are we to read the sequencing of the series itself? For instance, why are the scenes of five senses followed by a sixth tableau which features the emblazoned words “A mon seul désir”? What do we make of this cartouche which crowns the entire procession of images? Are we witnessing the triumph of a sixth sense which culminates the iconic narrative of the five? And if so, what exactly does this sixth sense mean? Does it represent an ascetic movement in which the Lady renounces the five senses in devotion to her only true desire – the unicorn as celestial savior? Or does the sixth sense signify rather an incarnational movement where the spirit descends kenotically into the other five senses, marking a sacred celebration of embodied life?

The former hypothesis finds support in the Platonic-metaphysical-moralist tradition which identifies the senses as temptations to be expelled by the rational soul. Carl Nordenfalk offers some evidence for this view when he notes that the Cluny Tapestries were made by the same artist – Master of Anne of Bretagne, Jean d’Ypres – who produced the “Ship of Temptations” allegory where the five senses are caricatured as five female follies.¹⁰See Carl Nordenfalk, "The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art" in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol 48, The Warburg Institute, 1985, pp 7-10. The equation of mind with male and senses with female actually goes back to Philo of Alexandria and further. It is clearly a gender stereotype of long history and one which deserves detailed critique in its own right. Suffice it for now to pose the question as to how this male/female opposition informs the host/guest relationship analyzed in this study.

The second reading – which I argue for here - is supported by the celebration of a sacramental sensibility illustrated in the paradisal landscape of fauna and flora colorfully depicted in all six tapestries. The glorious garden in which the Lady and Unicorn meet seems to blend purity with pleasure, serving as both 1) a locus amoenus or pleasure garden presided over by Venus, and 2) a hortus conclusus or cloistered garden which Christ and the Virgin cohabit as they recall an original Eden and await a coming Kingdom. This incarnational view – opposed to metaphysical dualisms of body and soul – is endorsed by Rilke’s interpretation of the Lady’s final gesture as a welcoming of the five senses into a sixth sense of the heart. Here the tent of the heart, at the centre of the sixth tableau and featuring the caption “A mon seul désir”, is opened by the animals (unicorn and lion) and presided over by a dog (traditionally a symbol of carnal lust but here transformed into a guardian of hallowed desire). Rilke’s description of the sixth tapestry is, it seems to me, inflected by a hint of sublime eros. He writes: “A tent has been erected. Blue damask with a gold flame motif. The animals open it and she advances simply in her princely garment. For what are those pearls by her side? The maidservant has opened a small casket and the Lady now takes from it a chain, a marvelous heavy piece of jewelry, which has been always locked away in the box. The small dog is sitting near her, up on a place made for him, and looks at it. And have you read the inscription at the top of the tent? You can see it says “A mon seul désir.”¹¹Rainer Maria Rilke cited by Delahaye, p. 39. See also the poem in this volume by Kascha Semonovitch, "A Visit to the Hunt of the Unicorn", New Arcadia Review, Fall, 2009.

6. The Lady and the Unicorn, A mon seul désir

In short, according to this incarnational reading, the Lady is accepting the secret jewels of desire rather than placing this gift in the box. This interpretation – in contrast to its ascetic alternative – is more in concert, I think, with the omnipresence in all six tapestries of charming flora and fauna. To be precise: over forty species of May flowers and over a dozen species of animal and bird associated with fecundity and flourishing. The floral fertility symbols include acorns, holly, pomegranates and orange trees, while the animals include monkeys, foxes, wolves, dogs, leopards, goats and cheetahs, not to mention scores of rabbits. As Bestiaries of the time reveal, the old French for rabbit, conil derives from the Latin cuniculus, the female sex. The aviary of birds let loose in the tapestries connote acts of ludic sparring and gaming – e.g. herons, falcons, magpies, partridges and mallard. In such a nature-loving game park, one is compelled to conclude that the Lady, in both dress and appearance, resembles Botticelli’s Primavera more than she does a celibate nun.

This efflorescent landscape is redolent of allusions to the erotic adventures of the 13th century romance, Le Roman de la Rose, as well as to the amorous games of the sorror spousa with her shepherd lover in the Song of Songs.¹²See Marie-Elizabeth Bruel, "Les Tapisseries de La Dame à la Licorne: Une représentation des vertus allégoriques du Roman de la Rose", in Gazette des Beaux-Arts: Le Chronique des arts, Dec 2000, pp 216-239. For a detailed account of the biblical, Christian and Marian themes of this tapestry, see Phyllis Ackerman, "The Lady and the Unicorn", The Burlington Magazine, vol 66, no 382, 1935, pp 35-36. The fact that the monkey holds a rose in one tableau suggests another significant reference to these poems of sensual abandon and hints that the entire sequence of tapestries may be a cryptic initiation in ars amandi.¹³See Anna Nilsen, "The Lady with the Unicorn: On Earthly Desire and Spiritual Purity", Studies in Art History, No 16, ed Marja Kanapas and Asa Ringbom, Society for Art History in Finland, 1995, pp 225-227. Nilsen notes the importance of the monkey appearing prominently in three of the tableaux and points to the fact that a monkey also appears in similar guise in a print by Antoine Verard of Adam and Eve and the Fall. This could mean that the Lady and Unicorn is a refiguring of the scene in the Fall where the new lovers represent a redemption of eros, the monkey now ceasing to be a tempter and becoming a symbol of healthy fecundity instead. The transfiguring of the wild lion and monstrous unicorn into loving companions of the Lady might also be said to signify this transformative reading. This would be echoed by the metamorphosis from Sebastian Brandt's depiction of the senses as a Ship of Fools or Temptresses in 1494 into the celebration of the senses as a paradise of joy and fecundity in the Cluny Tapestries. In keeping with this reading, Nilsen interprets the sixth tapestry as an act of amorous devotion in which the Lady bride places her flowered necklace into the chest as an offering of her virginity to her future lover (celebrating the Le Viste betrothal and marriage)(p 66). She also demonstrates how the five senses have a positive role in Christian narratives, with Listening central to the Annunciation, Touch and Sight central to healing etc. The letters "A" and "I" featured on the cartouche of the tent have given rise to an equally rich hermeneutic. While some commentators identify the letters as abbreviated initials for a human lover (fiancée, suitor, spouse), others have suggested it may refer to God (Alpha as one's only true desire) or to the Unicorn itself as both human and subhuman, animal and sacred, monstrous and divine: a fertile hybridity which refuses to be reduced to a single meaning or identity. For further readings of the letters in the Cartouche see Anna Nilsen, op.cit, p. 217; Carl Nordenfalk, op.cit, pp 217 f and Jean-Patrice Boudet, "La Dame à la licorne" (Le Pérégrinateur, Paris, 2008). Commenting on the esoteric and symbolic character of multiple motifs in the Tapestry he concludes that this mosaic of meanings "ne laisse pas de fasciner. Elle est loin d'avoir révélé tous ses secrets."

The incarnational reading opposes the binary opposition of spirit and senses, construing the Lady’s seul désir as both a turning inwards to the spiritual (as mystical Bride of Christ) and outwards to the sensual (as fiancée of her courtly lover). Not either/or but both/and. It signals a double fidelity to transcendent and immanent love, to the supernatural and natural at once. Indeed this reading consorts well with the Lady’s double gesture in the Sixth Tableau as both giving and receiving the jewels, removing them from her heart and assuming them to her heart simultaneously. In other words, such an hypothesis acknowledges that the sixth sense reconciles carnal and sacred desire. In so doing it construes the Cluny tapestry cycle as an iconic epithalamium in keeping with the Song of Songs and several classical texts of nuptial amour.

Here we confront a question which has preoccupied many commentators over the years, namely: does the key “Desire” tableau inaugurate the procession of five senses or end it? In other words, is it the first or last tapestry? If the former it could suggest that desire leads and commands the dance through the five senses. If the latter it could be read, according to the Platonic-ascetic model, as actually “terminating” the senses in an act of renunciation – an act which recognizes that the only true desire is for a super-sensible God in whose heart, as Augustine taught, the soul can alone find rest. While one option favors a dis-carnational movement of detachment, resisting the temptations of the Unicorn, the other sees the Lady as embracing the gift of desire from the unicorn. But my hypothesis, once again, is that perhaps the Desire tapestry is both first and final, at once opening and closing the odyssey through the five senses. The sequence of six tableaux would thus form a circle in which desire is both sublimated in an act of detachment and re-embraced in an act of embodiment. Once again, a dialectical chiasmus of transcendence and immanence rather than a dualism between them.

Such a double reading identifies the sixth sense as a primary sensus communis which synthesizes the other five. A secret faculty uniting both inner and outer experience. The Lady and the Unicorn can thus be told as a story of what I might call sacramental-embodied imagination. For the imagination, linked with the “heart” in both biblical and classical traditions, is the human function which overcomes the injurious dichotomy between reason and sensation.

This paradoxical function has been recognized by many mystics and by philosophers from Aristotle to Kant and Ricoeur. Aristotle seems to identify this mediating role of the heart when he discusses the “sixth sense” (sensus interior) in the De Anima and De Sensus. And Kant would appear to be referring to a similarly synthetic function when he claims that imagination is an “art hidden in the depths of nature” which schematizes and combines our sensible and intelligible experience. In the 20th century we find thinkers like Heidegger and Ricoeur refining the Kantian disclosure of a productive imagination which reconciles the faculties of sensation and understanding. Such a mediating role invites us to construe the tapestry less in terms of an allegory of fixed meaning than in terms of a metaphor which transposes one meaning to another in novel and surprising ways. Metaphor, as Ricoeur reminds us, is an imaginative act which fosters semantic indetermination by allowing a plurality of meanings to interanimate and ignite. Precisely what happens in this tapestry!¹⁴For a hermeneutic account of metaphor as a semantic interanimation between the senses and the intellect, between the literary and figural, the proper and improper, see Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977 and also Ricoeur's essay, very relevant to a reading of the tapestry in light of the Song of Songs, "The Nuptial Metaphor" in Thinking Biblically, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, pp 265 f.

I think it is also important to mention here Michel Serres’s fascinating discussion of the Sixth Sense as a hidden site of desire: “An appealing question arises, regarding the sixth tapestry, the only one bearing an inscribed cartouche. Have we five senses or six?....A sixth sense is necessary through which the individual can turn inwards and the body upon itself, a common sense, or internal sense. A sixth island was necessary…a tent represents this interior…”¹⁵Michel Serres in his book Les Cinq Sens: Philosophie des corps mélés -1 Grasset, Paris, 1985, pp 52. Serres proceeds to offer a very imaginative analysis of the six senses in the Tapestry. See also on the five senses Nordenfalk, op.cit, pp 2 -7. But of all the philosophers cited, I think it fair to say that the one likely to have exerted most influence on the designer of the Cluny Tapestry was Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris in the 15th century. In his famous work, Moralité du Coeur et des cinq sens, he claims that “there are six senses, five outside and one inside, which is the heart.”¹⁶Jean Gerson, Moralité du Coeur et des cinq sens, cited Delahaye, p 47 and also Anne Davenport, "The Lady and the Unicorn" in this volume, New Arcadia Review, Fall, 2009. Is it not to this same “coeur” that the poet, Thibaut of Champagne, alludes when he sings: “Love and the Lady hold my heart/and I cannot recover it”?

In conclusion I propose that the phrase “A mon seul désir” refers to the two directions of the heart – internal and external: a heart which takes the form of a Sixth Sense which combines traditional opposites: real and imaginary, immanent and transcendent, carnal and spiritual. So doing, the Sixth Sense of the heart could be said to reconcile 1) the erotic love celebrated by Courtly Love and Renaissance humanism with 2) the sublimated love of mystical theology cherished in the middle ages. The Sixth Sense thus reveals itself to be a swinging-door where eros both ascends towards the divine and descends towards the human at one and the same time. It is the hidden site where embodied and mystical imagination unite.¹⁷Elizabeth Delahaye endorses this double reading when she writes that the Cluny tapestry is unique in its "representation of a poetical world subtly mingling the real and the imagina...in its reconciling not only animals that are natural enemies but also the contradictory tendencies of human nature, the physical world of the senses and that of the spirit. Its resolutely positive vision, faith in man and in a possible reconciliation makes this hanging (circa 150...perhaps one of the most revealing works of a period in France that saw the shift between two worlds - or simply two moments in history? - one that was a slow maturing process rather than a sudden transformation: those we know today as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (op.cit, p 93).

My wager therefore is that the Cluny tapestries provoke a hermeneutic mutation within our understanding of “host” and “stranger”. If the Unicorn is intimately identified with the senses in the first five tableaux might we not see his progressive courtship with the Lady as promising a reconciliation in the Sixth sense – which in turn sets the whole sequence of desire into motion again? Thus instead of the five senses being demonized as follies and temptations, might the culminating image of Unicorn and Lady not be seen as an assumption of these senses rather than their repudiation? This would signify a hosting of the Unicorn as stranger rather than its dismissal as scapegoat. And then the full circle of six senses becomes a drama of sacramental embodiment in which the animal, human and the divine are reunited in a hybrid creature welcomed by the Lady into her tent of desire. If so, the terrifying Unicorn of traditional lore is transfigured from a monster into a mystical suitor who brings hidden jewels of love to his Lady. And in a final act of hospitality, the Lady-Host receives the Unicorn-Guest into her secret abode.¹⁸Since foxes and other animals feature prominently in the Cluny tapestries let me end with the final words of St Exupéry's Le Petit Prince: "'Goodbye', said the fox, 'and now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly.'"

June 12, 2009

Footnotes.

1. See for example, Bertrand D'Astorg, Le Mythe de la dame à la Licorne, Le Seuil, Paris, 1963.
2. See Elisabeth Delahaye, La Dame à la Licorne, Musée de Cluny, Paris, 2006, pp 61 f.
3. This is my own variation on the first English translation by Philemon Holland, 1601. Cited in Bestiare du Moyen Age: Les Animaux dans les Manuscrits, edited by Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Thierry Delcourt, Somogy Editions d'Art, Paris 2004, p 55. See in particular the Thierry Delcourt, "La Licorne et L'éléphant", pp 56-65.
4. Cited Delahaye, p 57.
5. Cited Delahaye, p 49.
6. See here the symbolic depiction of the unicorn in terms of Christian sacrifice by Pierre de Beauvais in his famous Bestiary of 1220. See Thierry Delcourt, Bestiare du moyen age, Ibid, illustrations pp 57-59. See also the illustration in this text of the unicorn as healing benefactor in a paradisal landscape by a river, ibid. p. 59.
7. See Li bestiaires d'amours di Maistre Richard de Fourneval e li response du besstiaire, ed Cesare Segre, Documenti de Filogia, vol 11, Milan and Naples, 1957. See illuminating commentary by Carl Nordenfalk, "The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art" in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol 48, The Warburg Institute, 1985, pp 1-3.
8. Song Book: the Capture of the Unicorn (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 846, fol.I. Circa 1280-1300). See Delahaye's commentary on this in the section, "The Lion and the Unicorn in the Middle Ages," Ibid.
9. Kristina Gourlay, " la Dame à la Licorne: A Reinterpretation," in La Gazette des Beaux Arts, Sept 1997, pp 53 and 62.
10. See Carl Nordenfalk, "The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art" in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol 48, The Warburg Institute, 1985, pp 7-10.
11. Rainer Maria Rilke cited by Delahaye, p. 39. See also the poem in this volume by Kascha Semonovitch, "A Visit to the Hunt of the Unicorn", New Arcadia Review, Fall, 2010.
12. See Marie-Elizabeth Bruel, "Les Tapisseries de La Dame à la Licorne: Une représentation des vertus allégoriques du Roman de la Rose", in Gazette des Beaux-Arts: Le Chronique des arts, Dec 2000, pp 216-239. For a detailed account of the biblical, Christian and Marian themes of this tapestry, see Phyllis Ackerman, "The Lady and the Unicorn", The Burlington Magazine, vol 66, no 382, 1935, pp 35-36.
13. See Anna Nilsen, "The Lady with the Unicorn: On Earthly Desire and Spiritual Purity", Studies in Art History, No 16, ed Marja Kanapas and Asa Ringbom, Society for Art History in Finland, 1995, pp 225-227. Nilsen notes the importance of the monkey appearing prominently in three of the tableaux and points to the fact that a monkey also appears in similar guise in a print by Antoine Verard of Adam and Eve and the Fall. This could mean that the Lady and Unicorn is a refiguring of the scene in the Fall where the new lovers represent a redemption of eros, the monkey now ceasing to be a tempter and becoming a symbol of healthy fecundity instead. The transfiguring of the wild lion and monstrous unicorn into loving companions of the Lady might also be said to signify this transformative reading. This would be echoed by the metamorphosis from Sebastian Brandt's depiction of the senses as a Ship of Fools or Temptresses in 1494 into the celebration of the senses as a paradise of joy and fecundity in the Cluny Tapestries. In keeping with this reading, Nilsen interprets the sixth tapestry as an act of amorous devotion in which the Lady bride places her flowered necklace into the chest as an offering of her virginity to her future lover (celebrating the Le Viste betrothal and marriage)(p 66). She also demonstrates how the five senses have a positive role in Christian narratives, with Listening central to the Annunciation, Touch and Sight central to healing etc. The letters "A" and "I" featured on the cartouche of the tent have given rise to an equally rich hermeneutic. While some commentators identify the letters as abbreviated initials for a human lover (fiancée, suitor, spouse), others have suggested it may refer to God (Alpha as one's only true desire) or to the Unicorn itself as both human and subhuman, animal and sacred, monstrous and divine: a fertile hybridity which refuses to be reduced to a single meaning or identity. For further readings of the letters in the Cartouche see Anna Nilsen, op.cit, p. 217; Carl Nordenfalk, op.cit, pp 217 f and Jean-Patrice Boudet, "La Dame à la licorne" (Le Pérégrinateur, Paris, 2008). Commenting on the esoteric and symbolic character of multiple motifs in the Tapestry he concludes that this mosaic of meanings "ne laisse pas de fasciner. Elle est loin d'avoir révélé tous ses secrets."
14. For a hermeneutic account of metaphor as a semantic interanimation between the senses and the intellect, between the literary and figural, the proper and improper, see Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977 and also Ricoeur's essay, very relevant to a reading of the tapestry in light of the Song of Songs, "The Nuptial Metaphor" in Thinking Biblically, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, pp 265 f.
15. Michel Serres in his book Les Cinq Sens: Philosophie des corps mélés -1 Grasset, Paris, 1985, pp 52. Serres proceeds to offer a very imaginative analysis of the six senses in the Tapestry. See also on the five senses Nordenfalk, op.cit, pp 2 -7.
16. Jean Gerson, Moralité du Coeur et des cinq sens, cited Delahaye, p 47 and also Anne Davenport, "The Lady and the Unicorn" in this volume, New Arcadia Review, Fall, 2009.
17. Elizabeth Delahaye endorses this double reading when she writes that the Cluny tapestry is unique in its "representation of a poetical world subtly mingling the real and the imaginary...in its reconciling not only animals that are natural enemies but also the contradictory tendencies of human nature, the physical world of the senses and that of the spirit. Its resolutely positive vision, faith in man and in a possible reconciliation makes this hanging (circa 150...perhaps one of the most revealing works of a period in France that saw the shift between two worlds - or simply two moments in history? - one that was a slow maturing process rather than a sudden transformation: those we know today as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (op.cit, p 93).
18. Since foxes and other animals feature prominently in the Cluny tapestries let me end with the final words of St Exupéry's Le Petit Prince: "'Goodbye', said the fox, 'and now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly.'"